Perhaps not strictly necessary, but definitely useful!
When an application grows in size and complexity and the build process becomes more involved, you'll want to implement some form of build automation.
ANT has been specifically designed, and is used extensively, for this purpose.
Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Nandini Bhaduri
Greenhorn
Joined: Oct 23, 2006
Posts: 11
posted
0
Depends on what you want to do. If you are going for a even moderately sized java application I would suggest you learn Ant. It makes life easier. Its an excellent tool.
Lester Burnham
Rancher
Joined: Oct 14, 2008
Posts: 1337
posted
2
Ant is not an IDE - it's a build tool. So while there's some overlap with IDEs -like compilation, creating jar/war files and javadocs, running JUnit tests etc.- Ant goes further in terms of custom bundling and deployment options. It can also be run as part of batch jobs, or as part of a build server.
I generally insist on an Ant script (or several) that can create everything from just the repository contents; experience has taught me not to rely on IDEs for that. Whatever other tools the developers use -even if each one prefers a different IDE- is secondary to that.
Qisen Jia
Greenhorn
Joined: Sep 25, 2009
Posts: 6
posted
0
Lester Burnham wrote:Ant is not an IDE - it's a build tool. So while there's some overlap with IDEs -like compilation, creating jar/war files and javadocs, running JUnit tests etc.- Ant goes further in terms of custom bundling and deployment options. It can also be run as part of batch jobs, or as part of a build server.
I generally insist on an Ant script (or several) that can create everything from just the repository contents; experience has taught me not to rely on IDEs for that. Whatever other tools the developers use -even if each one prefers a different IDE- is secondary to that.
There is something wrong with my expression,I know that Ant is not an IDE,
and we all know that Ant and IDE(like eclipse) can build a java project
so I want to know do I still need to learn how to use Ant to build a project?
think of your suggestion
at last I deciede to learn Ant
thanks a lot!
Almost everything you can do with Ant you can do directly on the command line as well, but it's going to involve a lot of typing. Yes, a shell script can do (almost) the same, but Ant's XML configuration makes it easier (at least to me).
0
